Avoiding, evading, dodging the issue
What do we call this then? Double standards? Affirmative action for the rich? Class warfare? Prejudice against the poor?
The black economy is normally associated with dodgy builders or painters and decorators. But white collar professionals are increasingly fiddling taxes, according to an MPs’ report today that discloses that 36 barristers have been forced to return £605,000 to tax authorities. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been recovered from lawyers, surgeons, medical consultants, and landlords under private deals with the tax authorities.
But this has not become public because none of the white collar tax evaders have been prosecuted, says the report by the Commons public accounts committee.
How many benefit scroungers would it take to defraud the Treasury of £605,000? A damn sight more than 36, I bet. All equal in the sight of the law, eh?
Where are the adverts warning tax dodgers the government are closing in on them? Where are the tabloid editorials screaming that these people are scum? Where are the government ministers? Why aren’t they sitting in TV studios across the country demonising tax fraudsters? Where are the chilling threats of invading their private lives or threatening their children’s wellbeing?
The poor scumbags that are caught committing benefit fraud are paraded through the media like modern day circus freaks. Nobody ever asks why they do it. (Well some do but they’re largely ignored.)
Those caught dodging tax? They’re allowed to make secret deals with the Treasury and swan on down the road. Is anybody asking why they do it? I rather doubt it’s to feed the kids or get out of a damp flat.
Tax evasion, avoidance, dodging or whatever you want to call it costs the country vastly more than benefit fraud. The government lumps the benefit fraud with payment errors to make the number sound bigger. And it’s an exact figure. So clued in are they to the losses through non-payment of tax that the Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs puts the estimate at between £10 billion and £40 billion. A £30 billion margin of error. I mean, Jesus.
It would take every dole fraudster and benefit payment incompetent in the country four years to match the bottom figure. Or somewhere around 16 years if they’re going to be ambitious and go for the £40 billion jackpot.
And guess what? They’re closing 90 tax offices. How’s that for prioritising? It almost makes you wonder if the government’s fuss about the money lost through benefit fraud is really the issue.
That they’re prepared to tolerate theft on a far, far grander scale by the Greater Good, the implication is that all these threats and demonisation is rather about teaching the lower orders to watch their backs and know their place. You can, in other words, stick your class-free society.
Now, where’s the outrage?
Update @ 4.30pm: The vacuous Five Live Drive have just done a facile segment on this. Guess which group of tax dodgers they sent their reporter out to track down. You’ll be less than amazed to hear it wasn’t lawyers, surgeons or medical consultants. No, it was your legendary dodgy builder. The egregious Peter Allen even did his best stereotypical cockney wideboy impression as well.
Posted on December 9th, 2008 at 10:47am under Crime and punishment, Evil of banality, Eye Catching Initiatives, New Labour
| Related posts... • Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown • Warning: cheap shot ahead • Benefit payments ‘must improve significantly’ |
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The poor scumbags that are caught committing benefit fraud are paraded through the media like modern day circus freaks.
Hmm. Are they really, or are a small proportion of the worst offenders actually charged and prosecuted, while the rest are told off and asked to pay it back (to whatever extent they can without starving)?
That’s a genuine question, not an assertion of what’s the case – I’d be interested to see evidence one way or another. But I’d be pretty amazed if there weren’t plenty of cases where it was dealt with in the same ‘do it again and we’ll throw the book at you, now get lost and count yourself lucky’ way as low-level tax dodging.
It’s a fair point. Maybe I should move away from the specific to the general and refine it to…
The poor scumbags thought to be committing benefit fraud are regarded in the media as modern day circus freaks.
It’s an ethos thing, I suppose. When was the last time we saw a tax dodger charged and prosecuted and gloated over in the media in the same way? Why isn’t it more of an issue in general? The sums involved are genuinely mind-boggling and surely enough to get tabloid readers frothing.
In my experience a majority of people will be asked to accept a formal caution as an alternative to prosecution (people will often be brow-beaten into accepting this, regardless of the strength of any proposed prosecution).
A formal caution is not a criminal caution, but if a client who has accepted a formal caution is later convicted of another offence, the court will be told about the formal caution and this may affect the sentence the client receives.
In my experience (from some time ago now) John B is roughly right, expcet that it’s not really a small proportion of the worst offenders as a small proportion of the offenders. The worst offenders would expect to be prosecuted. The rest, yes could expect to have their claims closed down and start repaying.
By the way, some of the fraud officers I came across while working for the DSS were bastards and bullies of a high order. I remember one in particular who I had to have a word with after he started screaming “TELL ME THE TRUTH OR THERE’LL BE NO MORE MONEY!” such that the whole floor could hear him. I bet that didn’t happen to the white-collar fiddlers.
ejh – there’s a Spooks-meets-Boys-from-the-Blackstuff satire in the making in that one example (though of course Pu8nrell would regard that as the basis for a DWP training manual).
Theft, if you please. If they’re willing to equivocated between error, fraud and theft when it comes to benefit claimants, I feel it only fair to return the favour.
Damn Justin, you’ve got me very cross over my chicken sarnie and now I’m going to hassle my MP, trouble is it’s fucking David Burrowes.
I have a radical solution to the question of benefit claimant fraud and it is this – the benefits system should be loose enough so that anyone who really needs to should be able to manipulate it to get a bit more. And here’s why – the more loopholes there are in the benefit system, the more money will go (ideally) to poor people and unemployed, thereby easing the pressure for the poor to go catburgling through the small hours just to have some kind of basic life.
I think this would be great – anyone else want to play with my theory?
I have a more radical solution – Citizen’s Income Scheme, aka Basic Income. Just cut through the whole Gordian knot and hand out money to everybody, no questions asked. It’s very cheap and simple to administer, too. Of course, it does have the “disadvantage” of foreclosing a lot of avenues for middle-class moral indignation…
I’ve been calling for a similar scheme for years, Dunc. Ever since reading Robert Anton Wilson’s ideas about the RICH economy back at university, in fact.
This has to represent some kind of “law” or “rule”.
How about:
“The inverse fraud law”
“The more money you defraud from the Government the less fuss they make over it.”
Generally, people doing “illegal” work do so either because New Labour in their wisdom prohibits them from making a contribution through tax & NI & enjoying employment protection (asylum seekers) or because shithead employers want to deny them rights (various really desperate people).
I see no reason to vilify either group.
I believe the standard right-wing excuse for tax dodgers is that the poor darlings can’t cope with all the restrictions the evil state puts on them, so they have to go breaking the law.
*for wealthy tax dodgers
I’m informed by my old man, who specialises in benefit law, that landlords are among the worst fiddlers of housing benefit, but likewise tend to be overlooked when it comes to red-top moral indignation*. Property owning classes, dontchaknow?
* Unless it’s a council housing some asylum seekers, of course.
[...] at Chicken Yoghurt has a couple of good pieces (Fighting over the scraps and Avoiding, evading, dodging the issue) on the tendency of mainstream politics to demonise the poor and disenfranchised. After all, the [...]
As you say, Justin, HMRC is in the process of axing dozens of tax offices (in the name of ‘efficiency’, natch!) and removing compliance and collection staff from large areas of the UK. Compliance is already understaffed as it is, yet is facing still more cuts. This means that cases where the brave businessmen have underpaid their tax will not even be looked at if the underpayment is less than about £10000. As this is the majority of them, billions of pounds of lost revenue are going unrecovered.
Another widespread fiddle is where company directors (and do you remember when the News Of The Screws used to use that phrase as a euphemism for ‘crook’?) pay themselves a salary which, totally by chance of course, is just under the personal tax allowance, and then top up their income with share dividends (often to the tune of £20-30000 a year) because dividends are only taxable at 10% and 32.5& as opposed to 20% and 40%. Closing that loophole would bring in huge amounts, but we can’t annoy the ‘wealth creators’, can we? Meanwhile, staff in HMRC have to claim the Tax Credits they themselves administer because, apparently, civil servants cause inflation.
civil servants cause inflation
As I understand it, paying anyone below a certain income bracket causes inflation, except at times of economic crunchiness, when it can also cause deflation, stagnation, stagflation and, most advantageous of all, distraction.
Also see Mark Easton
[...] evading, dodging the issue http://www.chickyog.net/2008/12/09/a…ing-the-issue/ What do we call this then? Double standards? Affirmative action for the rich? Class warfare? [...]